The art of making hits from myths

TYPE "Neil" into Google, and the first name that pops up is not
Neil Diamond or Neil Young, but Neil Gaiman. The British-born
author knocked Dan Brown off the top of the The New York
Times bestseller list last year and, as the creator of the
acclaimed graphic novel The Sandman, he's revered by comic
fans.

Tall, dark and handsome, he's recently been hanging out with
Angelina Jolie on the set of the film Beowulf, for which he
co-wrote the script. Despite all these credentials he is, like most
parents, totally embarrassing to his children.

"I'm really looking forward to being a grandparent so I stop
embarrassing my kids," Gaiman says in his tidy English accent.

"My grandparents were never embarrassing, whereas parents can
embarrass you just by acknowledging you on the street when your
friends were around."

Even a divine father can be embarrassing. Just ask Fat Charlie
Nancy, the protagonist in Gaiman's latest novel, Anansi
Boys, which made its debut on The New York Times
bestseller list late last year.

Although his dad is the West African spider god Anansi -
embodied by a hip old black man in yellow gloves and a fedora - the
young accountant finds him mortifyingly embarrassing. When Anansi
dies at a karaoke night, Fat Charlie learns he has a long-lost
brother, Spider, who inherited their father's supernatural
powers.

Soon, the charming brother is on the scene and ruining Fat
Charlie's life. Fat Charlie seeks help from some elderly neighbours
who use voodoo from the old country to get rid of the annoying
brother. That, of course, is where the real trouble starts.

The Anansi mythology originated in West Africa, but soon spread
to Jamaica, the West Indies and the southern states of the US
(where Anansi stories are often retold as Brer Rabbit tales).

In Gaiman's story, patois and Jamaican accents are used to great
effect, lending an extra dose of cool to these characters.

Did Gaiman worry about stepping out of his cultural territory
and playing around with Afro-Caribbean folklore?

"Absolutely. But if I am only allowed to write stories in which
the protagonist and the folklore are those of third-generation
English Jews who have gone to live in America, my stories will get
very boring very quickly," he says. "But I am telling the
story of my people, in that my people are humanoids living on this
planet." Gaiman did his best to get the Jamaican accents and
references right, but his efforts were lost on some readers.

"What fascinated me was the amount of people who assumed that
because these women were in Florida, they were little old white
ladies and somehow I couldn't work out a little old white lady
accent," he says.

"People explained that the food I'd described at the funeral was
totally wrong and in fact I'd made it sound as though it was a
Jamaican funeral. It was strange how it just wouldn't enter
people's heads that it actually was a Jamaican funeral."

Anansi Boys is the latest in a string of successes for
45-year old Gaiman. Born in Porchester in southern England, he grew
up reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

While working as a journalist in the 1980s - his biography of
Duran Duran is something of a collectors item - he collaborated
with the fantasy author Terry Pratchett on the apocalyptic comic
novel Good Omens. The book spent 17 weeks on The Sunday
Times bestseller list.

Nowadays, Gaiman's output includes novels, graphic novels, poems
and songs. In 2002, American Gods won the Hugo Award for the
best fantasy work. But he's probably best known for his comic
series The Sandman, a sophisticated, artistically ambitious
work, which garnered a loyal following during its nine years of
publication. Ten volumes of the comic are still in print. The
series' hero is Dream, the "immortal anthropomorphic
personification of dreams" who also goes by the names, Morpheus,
Oneiros, Lord Shaper and the Prince of Stories. Confused? Gaiman
himself has summarised the plot as: "The king of dreams learns one
must change or die and then makes his decision."

What is clear is that Gaiman was writing about magic long before
Harry Potter made it mainstream. "In the old days, if there was
anyone in the signing line over 50 it was somebody's mum," he says.
Now, he says, there's more diversity among his fans because more
people are reading books in general. "I think that's because people
are storytelling animals and people like stories. One of the things
that has got people reading again is the rise of children's fiction
which, through the '80s and early '90s, had practically been driven
into the ground," he says. "Most children's fiction seemed to be
rather gloomy and set on council estates and the main character's
brother had problems with heroin, and those were the cheery ones.
And they wondered why kids weren't reading! Then Harry Potter came
along, stories where the biggest thing was wanting to know what
happened next."

Despite his growing army of fans, to his kids, Gaiman remains an
embarrassing old fart with a bad haircut. At least his two
daughters and son can feel relieved that their father has so far
resisted his urge to dress like Anansi.

"When I was in New Orleans in '93, I got to go to the French
Quarter, where you run into these little old black guys wearing
bright yellow gloves and red fedoras. It seemed natty, it was a
sense of style that I in my leather jacket and black jeans could
only dream of," he says.

"I thought, 'If only I was a 70-year-old black man called Blind
Melon Goodbody, I could wear a hat like that'. I mean, they wore
spats for God's sake. Who wears spats?"

Neil Gaiman will be speaking at 6.30pm on Monday at the
Sydney Town Hall as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival. Entry
$15/$10. Bookings: 92501988.